Wheelchairs in Sports
After World War II, wheelchair sports began to gain in popularity. Since the 1940s, there have been high-level wheelchair athletics programs; basketball and racing are probably the best-established but today there are also hockey, rugby, fencing, billiards, football, bowling, tennis, curling, sailing, skiing, volleyball and more.
The need of athletes for high-performance Wheelchairs drove innovation; the big old clunky hospital-style chairs would not remain the only option for long. In 1979 Marilyn Hamilton, Jim Okamoto, and Don Helmanproduced a mass-market lightweight folding wheelchair called the "Quickie"; its design and its sexier name revolutionized manual wheelchair manufacturing and marketing. In 1984, George Murray became the first wheelchair athlete to be featured on the Wheaties cereal box.
Wheelchairs in Sports